Microsoft has recently announced that it is retiring two of its mapping products, MapPoint and Streets and Trips. Both of these services have received their last update and will soon be retired in favor of Microsoft"s premier mapping product, Bing Maps.
We don"t know exactly when Microsoft changed their pages to announce that these services had reached their "End of Life" and a quick search around the web shows that it is not widely known.
MapPoint made it easier to view, edit and integrate maps into existing applications, and Streets and Trips was a route planning package that was a subset of MapPoint. Knowing what these products do, it"s not a surprise that these services are being retired in favor of Bing Maps.
Both of these applications are examples of how applications are moving to the browser. Both of these mapping services used to live inside their own isolated application, but with the browser quickly an application that can support running high end processes inside of it, these former stand-alone products are quickly disappearing.
Streets and Trips will have online support available until July 14, 2015; both products can still be purchased up to 12/31/2014.
Source & Image Credit: Microsoft 1, 2 | Thanks for the tip Remco!